This invention relates to the field of artificial intelligence, and more specifically to the fields of machine learning and expert system, and to object-oriented technology, therefore it is in the area of object-oriented machine learning and object-oriented expert system.
The goal of this invention is using machine learning and object-oriented technology to discover knowledge from databases and other data sources, and store discovered knowledge into a knowledge base. An object-oriented expert system can read the knowledge base and generate inference results directly.
The special features of the present invention are:
First, in the object-oriented technology, objects in a class are used directly, without introducing additional structures, such as tree structures of objects, decision trees, relations, or frames. From beginning to the end of the process, from the working objects to the result, the only structure discussed is object and class, and all objects are in the same class.
Second, in the learning process, generate-and-test technique is used in a top-down process, this means from the most general conjunctive objects to the less general conjunctive objects. And some threshold conditions are applied to the selection of the qualified learning objects.
Third, in the expert system, the inference process is reduced to the direct comparison between the test object and each knowledge object. If a matched knowledge object is found, the action in this object is executed. The same as in the object-oriented learning process, no additional structures, such as tree structures of objects, decision trees, relations, or frames are introduced.
The above three points disclosed in this invention are different from any existing systems or published technologies.
The inventor has a patent "Relational Artificial Intelligence System" (U.S. Pat. No. 5,473,732), in which the relational technology is introduced. The object-oriented technology is totally different from the relational technology. In the U.S. Pat. No. 5,473,732 there are relations and arrays but no objects and classes; in this invention, there are objects and classes, but no relations and arrays.
The inventor has another patent (U.S. Pat. No. 5,263,126). This is a table-formed expert system. Only tables but no objects and classes are discussed there. It is not object-oriented, therefore it is totally different from this invention.